Home > Consumer Reviews > Linksys WPC54A Wireless 802.11a PC Card

I am quite disappointed with this product. First of all, did anyone mention that "Turbo Mode" doesn't work if you are running Windows XP? The only place where I see this mentioned is in the Troubleshooting section of the Installation Guide. Second, 152-bit WEP encryption is not available. The highest value available from the drop-down is 128 bit. Both of these problems are present even after I updated to the latest driver. To me, this is false advertising. There are many other minor problems as well. The installation guide warns against using the Setup program supplied on the CD-ROM if you are running XP. We supposed to just use Windows XP to search for the driver from the CD. This gives me an impression that the product was not ready and was rushed out of the door. Second, the supposedly more detailed User Guide on the CD-ROM is nothing more than a re-phrase of the Quick Installation Guide. Why bother? Finally, who in their right mind will ship their Access Point with MAC Filtering turned ON? It wasted me an hour to figure out this was the reason why the connection wasn't working. Once you know about all the little problems that I mentioned here, the entire setup should take no more than 10 minutes for a technical person. Instead, it took me almost two hours, and I consider myself very technical. I am giving two stars instead of one because once I finally set it up, it works pretty well througout my small two-story house. I get a reported 54Mbps if the laptop is right next to the Access Point. Other than that, don't even think about 54Mbps. From the next room, I get between 12Mbps and 48Mbps. From a different floor, I get between 6Mbps and 24Mbps. Keep in mind that these are just the reported speeds. The true speeds are roughly half of these numbers, as have been well documented in PC Magazine testing. In any case, I'll take these numbers any days for the benefit of having wireless freedom.

Unit runs hot, and doe not work under Win2k. Unit hangs within 1-15 minutes. Pulling card out of slot resolves the issue, reinserting resets cards, but hangs again within 1-15 minutes.

Tech support (in Philippines) cannot help. Issue under review by Linksys.

Update: Linksys would not fix. Warranttee not worth the paper it's printed on. The unit is in the garbage, as my new laptop has built is WiFi THAT WORKS!!

I bought this WPC54A adapter for use with my Linksys WRT51AB access point under Windows XP but was completely unable to get it to work. It always locked up my Gateway Solo 9550 laptop within 10 seconds of plugging it in. I tried the later drivers as per tech support and after that my laptop froze immediately every time upon inserting the card. Tech support suggests that this may be an IRQ conflict, but there is no way to change the IRQ. I returned the card to CompUSA and got a Netgear HA501A card and it worked right out of the box (except turbo mode, apparently it doesn't work well with Windows XP, which by the way, is mentioned nowhere on the box). Bottom line, do your research before you buy and you will see that Linksys has some serious issues to work out with the WPC54A wireless card. Good Luck...

I have to agree with another reviewer; the card seems like a great deal, but it just doesn't work. After several e-mails back and forth with their "technical support" department, they stopped responding. The basic problem is after running for a while, the card will lock the computer forcing you to remove the card to restore the computer. Purchased a DLink DWL-A650 as a replacement and have not had a problem. Linksys will not take the card back for repair or exchange. Most people are having problems with Windows 2000, but my problem was with Windows XP using a Dell Inspiron laptop.

I purchased two of Linksys' 802.11a PC Cards, due to pleasant experiences with Linksys products in the past. However, this product caused two laptops (Dell Latitude C840, Toshiba Portege 3480) to hang. The laptops were both running Windows XP. I contacted Linksys' technical support, who stated that the problem was due to IRQ conflicts, and that I would have to contact the laptop manufacturer technical support to reassign the IRQs; however, Dell's technical support confirmed that the IRQs cannot be reassigned. I again contacted Linksys' technical support who told me that the product was not compatible and that I should return it.